Along with development of IT technology, a wide variety of devices are used in organizations such as companies. Under the circumstance, burdens of management of devices (endpoints) on the organizations such as companies are rapidly increasing, and hence an endpoint management product is attracting attention (see, for example, Non-patent Literature 1).
In general, the endpoint management product provides a function of performing a configuration change on an endpoint. Here, the configuration change on the endpoint refers to a configuration change of a system or an application in the endpoint, and includes patching and application introduction. The endpoint management product also provides a function of remotely applying a configuration change to a plurality of endpoints at a time.
Further, in the endpoint management product, an endpoint as an application target of a configuration change can be generally designated using a conditional expression and the like. Specifically, the endpoint as the application target can be selected by designating the version of an operating system (OS), an application and patching conditions concerning the configuration change, and the configuration of the system (such as the value of a particular registry).
In the case of applying a configuration change to endpoints using the endpoint management product as described above, the following method is generally adopted. That is, a system department or the like applies in advance the configuration change to a test environment of an endpoint having a general configuration. After sufficiently testing that a trouble does not occur, the system section or the like applies the configuration change to endpoints of general users.
In addition to the above, a technique of setting up software in common for a plurality of apparatuses is known (see, for example, Patent Literature 1).
Patent Literature 1 discloses a technique in which an analysis apparatus determines common software to be set up for its own apparatus, reads out configuration information corresponding to the common software from a storage medium, compares configuration information on its own apparatus with the read-out information, determines an apparatus having the same configuration or an apparatus having a similar configuration from among apparatuses for which the common software has been set up, reads out set-up result information on the apparatus having the same configuration or the apparatus having a similar configuration from the storage medium, and outputs the read-out information as set-up success/failure information on the common software.
Moreover, a technique of making a processing program common to different database groups is also known (see, for example, Patent Literature 2).
Patent Literature 2 discloses a database system in which: an operating system reads setting information and determines which database is to be connected; when a compiler complies a database processing program (source format) in which a database to be processed is not specified, the compiler identifies a database to be processed in each step, on the basis of description of environment information recorded in a currently connected database; and the database processing program (object format) thus compiled is executed on a database group.
Further, a technique of constructing a calculator environment equivalent to various user PCs is also known (see, for example, Patent Literature 3).
Patent Literature 3 discloses an execution environment construction apparatus including: an environment configuration data creation unit for calculating the degree of demand of environment configuration data close to a user environment information DB demanded by a user, and constructing an execution environment on an execution terminal on the basis of the calculated degree of demand; and an environment configuration data selection unit for selecting environment configuration data having a degree of environment similarity close to the user environment information, from the execution terminal on which the execution environment is constructed. The execution environment construction apparatus constructs an execution environment configured by a software resource including at least one operating system, on an execution terminal.